


When Color Hurts

by Nicole Crucial (moilArchitect)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, One Shot, Post-Sburb/Sgrub
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-23
Updated: 2012-12-23
Packaged: 2017-11-22 02:28:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/604807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moilArchitect/pseuds/Nicole%20Crucial
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You smile, you crack, she pieces herself together only to twist and contort in ways no soul should, and one day as she smears lipstick on the ceiling you ask her why everything started out as white if she was only going to change it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When Color Hurts

**Author's Note:**

> Written for tumblr user spacetimebeatdown and an anon.

Rose Lalonde is the most lovely enigma you've ever met, and considering that you love the fuck out of most of the trolls, that is definitely saying something. She is prodigiously intelligent and makes really stupid mistakes, she knows what she does wrong and she does it anyway and doesn't apologize. She is not a perfect human being, but only because those don't exist and who is she to fill such a hideously righteous stereotype; but she is so flawed and pieced-together and broken that it all swirls together like white wine in her glass in a glorious imitation. She walks with carefully placed poise that could shatter at any moment, with an expression so blasé and casual that it almost screams counterfeit.

She tries the hardest of anyone you've ever known to be impeccable and faultless, and yet she's never actively hidden a thing from you. Yes, she leaves you to figure out much for yourself, but her deception is in her simple honesty and others' assumptions; a utilization of the very weapon that Scratch destroyed her cracked marble pedestal with.

She walks barefoot through the house, toes curling on thick wine-stained white carpet and smooth cold tile, a glass of something in one hand she never drinks, wearing only black lipstick and her best dress (all of them are her best), and she dips her fingers in pools of blindingly bright acrylic paint and drags them carelessly across the walls with a laziness and purpose that are as contradictory as she.

She takes baths in the red wine her mother loved, to get rid of it all she says, and then she laughs and says no, maybe it's a substitute for blood that'll keep her young and beautiful. She knows she's beautiful, she just doesn't care. Her hair has started to grow long, and though it doesn't seem like her and it gives off a definite warning sign to how very little she is taking care of herself, you can't help but love the way it smells when she falls asleep on you, the way it slides, a sticky-smooth waterfall, off of your hands on the rare occasions she lets you play with it.

She is a skittish, volatile thing, and on some days she will pretend she doesn't wobble in stiletto heels, dance around the house, fall down stairs and sprain her ankle (she is actually much tougher than she looks), while some she will spend curled up in the observatory with a violin and blank sheets of staff paper, a photograph, and a long, bloodstained pink scarf.

You should've noticed earlier that something is not quite right, but Sburb leaves you numb to all non-existentially-threatening problems for a long while, and it is only now that you begin to see how strange it is that she drags long nails across her hips just to see the marks, that she eats like a rabbit and sleeps like the dead. She didn't beg you to come, she didn't ask you to help her, but you know too well that she is too pathetic to ask and too proud to beg, and you know the haunted look in her eyes is not something that the horrorterrors will let fade.

You do your best to catch her when she falls out of bed, down the stairs, off the sofa, even almost over the observatory railing one time; the windy thing is very convenient for keeping bemused young maidens' heads in the clouds and not slamming into the ground. It seems that she is always falling, down down down into a dark abyss, that she does it on purpose so that maybe the vertigo will set her back to rights. You doubt that it will help but hope that it is possible for her to be okay again, and when you make her laugh--laugh, not smirk, not chuckle, not snicker--the hope swells. You play with her food, make her watch shitty movies, play gorgeous piano-violin improv duets that prove just how in tune you are to each other, and throw cake on the walls to add to her artwork.

You smile, you crack, she pieces herself together only to twist and contort in ways no soul should, and one day as she smears lipstick on the ceiling you ask her why everything started out as white if she was only going to change it.

"Color hurts," she tells you, and you don't understand. She always says the dumbest philosophical shit, like really, Rose, can't you just speak English?

She smiles a little when you tell her but not enough, and drops the lipstick so it breaks on the carpet, steps down from the ladder and grinds it into the ground with one maroon stiletto. "Color hurts," she repeats, "because my world is made of shades of gray, John. I built myself for a world of muted hues and detachment, for disappointment and apathy. Color smiles, laughs, cries, rants. Color hurts."

You think you're understanding a little, but not really. Your tongue pushes against your teeth like it always does when she says something perplexing that leaves you vaguely, deeply troubled, so you say, "Then why do you do it?"

"I'm tired of shades of gray. I'm tired of a world of being alone," she says quietly, and her eyes are deep, deep amethyst, and she doesn't look away. "You live in a world of color, John.

"Maybe I want to be there with you."

Even her faintest hint of blush is purplishly hued, but her face is straight and solemn, and for once you realize that she is making herself sick and broken trying to fit into a place where she doesn't, where she isn't alone, a place where you fit, a place where shades of gray don't bleed into the furthest of rings and where horroterrors cannot stretch their ugly, desperate tentacles.

You are not much for symbolism, but she is, and it's appropriate because she is the ultimate symbol, herself. And you finally understand.

You scratch the back of your head before you sweep her into your arms, and automatically her fingers twine around your neck, smearing dark makeup by your hair. Well, "sweeping" qualifies more as an awkward wrapping because you can never do anything not-awkwardly just like she can never do anything not-stiffly, but the sentiment as the same. You give her your best, goofiest smile, kiss her forehead and smell her red-wine hair.

"You know, for such a smart girl, you can be pretty dumb sometimes, Rose," you murmur into her paper-pale skin. "You can't be _in_ someone's world if you _are_ it."

There is damp on your neck, and sometimes you are not sure if it is made of tears or kisses.


End file.
